Placing people in the center
Placing people in the center
Audi currently employs over 87,000 people worldwide, with some 54,000 employees in Germany alone. Their cultural backgrounds, skills, and experience bring a rich diversity to the company. Each individual also brings needs that can change depending on their phase in life. Audi supports and qualifies its employees in all situations, always putting them at the center.
Diverse and inclusive workplace
As a global group, Audi has firmly established diversity and inclusion (D&I) across the company. Diversity is a prerequisite for innovation and is more crucial than ever in times of transformation. Companies can only hope to achieve sustainable success when employees of all generations, cultures, mindsets, skills, and competencies work together. Therefore, on its path to all-electric and fully connected mobility, Audi consciously promotes a diverse corporate culture. From employee networks such as dads@Audi or internationals@Audi and a vibrant queer community to the Audi Philharmonic Wind Orchestra, Audi creates space for a diversity of perspectives and interests.
To promote diversity consistently and ensure equal opportunities, Audi is committed to embedding diversity and inclusion into all company processes. For example, the company uses targeted questions in a D&I check to analyze its recruiting and personnel development activities.
When work focuses on the well-being of all
The brand with the four rings takes the needs of its employees seriously. Among other things, it supports them by offering extended sabbaticals. At the same time, Audi sees hybrid working models as an essential component of a modern, cooperative culture. The company, therefore, offers a balance between remote working and working in the office. The company’s “Hybrid Working” agreement, which has been in effect at the Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm sites since October 1, 2022, offers employees considerable flexibility, self-determination, and personal responsibility. Employees whose roles are not conducive to hybrid working can still benefit from a modern working environment at Audi. This includes, for example, flexible shift work models and new concepts for rooms to make time spent on-site more attractive.
In addition to flexible working time models, childcare slots for Audi employees’ children in partnered daycare centers help balance employees’ professional and private lives. Audi employees also enjoy parental leave that goes above and beyond the legal requirements. The company allows them longer than the statutory three years of parental leave with a guarantee of re-employment. The policy allows for parental leave of up to seven years. Moreover, Audi provides information and support for employees caring for a relative. Employees can also take full or partial leave to care for close relatives.
Holistic approach: A focus on health
Audi takes a holistic approach to occupational health and safety in its workplaces. The company cares about both the physical and mental health of its employees and managers. In times of transformation, the demands on each individual are especially great. These demands make it even more important to involve all employees in helping shape a sustainable, prosperous future together.
Audi’s gastronomy services attach great importance to nutrition and health and regard the company’s food culture as an expression of Audi’s appreciation of its employees. One example of the company’s efforts in this area is the range of vegetarian and vegan meals offered in Audi’s company cafeterias; the menu is constantly expanding.
Lifelong learning
One of Audi’s main internal focuses is personnel development and the qualification of employees for new tasks. Audi has invested around 300 million euros in training and developing its employees in the past two years. To establish a binding framework for lifelong learning and to emphasize its importance, Audi updated its company qualifications agreement in 2023. The agreement defines measures that enable employees to learn at any time. The update has made it even easier for employees to apply for educational leave. It also provides for the company’s continuous and sustainable increase in training time. In addition, digital learning platforms allow employees to study topics, such as artificial intelligence or data science, from any place and at any time that may not be relevant to their current career path.
Transformation demands new key competencies
The automotive industry is undergoing the greatest transformation in its history. The entire landscape is changing: Not just legislation, technologies, products, and processes, but customers and their needs. This transformation demands new competencies and perspectives and questions established structures and functions. At Audi, the main focus is on digitalization and electric mobility. The workforce is a crucial factor in the success of this transformation. The brand with the four rings is equipping its employees for the careers and challenges of the future through targeted training programs.
The aim is to develop key skills for Audi’s future fields through upskilling and building new skills through continuous reskilling. The company’s employment guarantee to the end of 2029 gives employees the security they need to focus on their personal development. Audi is also adapting its training, dual study programs, and trainee programs to this change, focusing on professional fields of the future. In this way, Audi promotes the necessary skills for the future from the outset and gives young people the chance to shape the mobility of tomorrow.
Audi also cooperates with the scientific community in this context. For example, the company partners with institutions and supports students in writing their dissertations at universities that deal with these future topics.
Neckarsulm as a competence center for high-voltage batteries
Audi’s transformation is having a powerful impact on the company’s Technical Development Department. Tasks are becoming more complex as development activities transform into continuous update capabilities to meet customers’ expectations that their vehicles will receive updates and new services for both software and hardware. The company must align its processes, qualifications, and mindsets with this expectation. The new approach prioritizes continuous development instead of thinking in cycles. The early decision to switch to all-electric vehicles allows the company to plan for the future confidently.
The Neckarsulm site will act as a competence center for developing high-voltage batteries to enable Audi to concentrate fully on battery technologies from 2026. Employees in the Neckarsulm Technical Development unit who wish to specialize in this field will continue to benefit from Audi’s training opportunities in the coming years. In addition to the battery testing center in Gaimersheim, a battery center for testing high-voltage storage technologies will go into operation – and employees are already receiving training to run it.
New battery assembly facility in Ingolstadt
One example of how Audi is modernizing and expanding production within existing structures is the new battery assembly plant for models based on the Premium Platform Electric (PPE) in Ingolstadt, with an automation rate of almost 90 percent. In an area of 30,000 square meters, 300 employees work daily in three shifts to assemble up to 1,050 high-voltage batteries for PPE vehicles. Vehicles based on the PPE include the Audi Q6 e-tron and the Audi A6 e-tron series. In this way, the brand with the four rings is gaining important experience that it will later apply to its production of battery modules.
The plant’s employees are already benefiting from the experience of their colleagues from production in Brussels and the expertise of the battery testing center in Gaimersheim.
As of: March 2024
